Dragon's Eye

by Andy Oakes

  Leaning across his desk, breath as sour as unfermented wine.

  “Your life is fading by the minute, Sun Piao. Kill the Englishman. You do it. You know him. You have the anger. Kill him and live. Kill him and you will be protected by the law from the charges that are held against you.”

  “The law? What does a man like you know about the law, Minister, except that others follow laws and you make them and break them.”

  A cough rattling the Minister. Deep. Dark. A storm of the soul escaping through a gaping mouth. Lips as tight as elastic bands stretched to their limits.

  “Kill him. Look what, look what he has done to me. Kill … kill him.”

  Looking deep into Zhu’s eyes. Tears, in weak tracks down his cheeks. From his lips, spittle, on fine filament dribbles Silver-white and flecked scarlet, dropping down to the desktop.

  “No, Minister. I will not kill for you. Or for me.”

  Zhu’s cough ploughing deeper, suddenly halting to a sharp intake of breath. A barbed hook that rolled his eyes. That made his crab fingers scuttle across the desk, seeking some unknown purpose. On his lips, down the front of his shirt, as thick and as deep hued as plum sauce … blood. Instinctively, Piao running to the double doors, thumping on them with both fists. Hearing his own voice in a guttural shout for help. Instantly, the two security officers swept into the study, sweeping the old man into their arms. His spectacles in a slow tumble to the floor. Blood and thin laced vomit, across their shirts in an angry scar. An immediate reek of bile, vinegar and gamy, filling the room. Mutterings from Zhu’s lips, loose and mouthing against the security officer’s chest as they swiftly ran him from the room and into the corridor. A door opening, closing, at the very end of the corridor. And then silence. Complete. Unbroken. As silent as if the world itself was holding its breath.

  *

  Piao slept for five hours, seeming like five minutes. Aware of the constant activity at the end of the corridor. Comings, goings, from Kang Zhu’s room.

  He awoke worried into the dark. Never as black. Sitting on the end of the bed … Lingling.

  *

  Morning. The sky lemon, when she rose kissing him … tasting of salt and strawberries. Her words few. Last words. Almost thrown away as if they didn’t really matter. As if she had never doubted that he would agree to what she would ask. The Englishman, Haven, what he had done to the eight in the river. To the Minister. To herself … the HIV, the slow boat of death. What he had done to Piao … his trial, his execution only days away. So many venerable reputations to be soiled by his wrongdoings; reputations pulled through the mud. So many to lose face. Such loss of face. Yes, he had to be killed. There was no other way. The Senior Investigator would, of course, do as the Minister had requested … save himself and kill the Englishman. She kissed him again, this time longer. Sweeter.

  “Haven. Kill him, Sun. If not for the Minister, then for me.”

  She had smiled, and automatically he questioned the words that he knew that he wanted to say. Each one a fishbone in his throat.

  “I am not an assassin.”

  Lingling closed the door, walking silently to the room at the end of the corridor. The smile slipping from her face.

  *

  The day was one of uncomfortable silence. Sleeping, as it took him. The nervous naps of a cat dozing on a window ledge high above the ground. Dreams of only hard things. Spiked things. Food served at regular intervals by an elderly, toothless a-yi. Outside of his room, the measured pace of security officers. And inside of his room … a constant awareness of the corridor and the Minister Kang Zhu’s bedroom at the dark end of it.

  Seeing Lingling only once during the whole of that day. A glimpse, brief and desolate, as she had run the length of the corridor. Her bare feet making no sound. Both hands clasped to her face. Tears bleeding between the gaps of her fingers.

  *

  Dust angels moving through a splinter of morning light.

  The a-yi left … Piao’ s eyes adjusting to the darkness of the study. Moods, textures, filling the room to its brim. Everything the hue of mahogany and bitter chocolate, except Lingling. Her back, hard against the bookshelved wall … wearing white. Completely in white. The colour of death. At the centre of the study, the carved desk had been removed. In its place, a heavy chromium plated stand, resting upon it, a dark wood coffin. A re-touched Kang Zhu only partially filling its large gaping interior. Hair slicked. Cheeks rouged. Lips painted. More a septuagenarian clown than a Minister of Security.

  She moved from the bookshelf towards the casket. Her perfume, Chanel … invading. A sharp stiletto piercing other scents. The scents that Piao always associated with death. Wet earth. Long standing puddles. Rusty railings. Fallen fruit. She stood at the coffin, her crimson tipped fingers braced on its carved wood and gently tapping to some anonymous rhythm. Speaking across its mouth. Speaking across the body of Zhu. Again, the question … more forthright this time. It worrying Piao that she felt no need of levers in her words.

  “Will you kill the Englishman for me?”

  For me. The Minister’s dead, but Lingling taking up the reins of vengeance.

  “I am not an assassin.”

  For a second, her fingers still, before moving to the window and pulling the drapes aside. Piao shielding his eyes as the room flooded ice-white. Details … noticing details. The fingerprint grain in the wood of the coffin. Gold titles on the spines of the leather bound books. ‘The Water Margin’. ‘Rulin Waishi’. ‘The Family’. ‘David Copperfield’. And Zhu’s eyes, looking like black scratches under glass. Mascara smeared and charcoal pencil underlined. The Senior Investigator’s gaze drawn to the residence’s gardens, a verdant fist … at its centre a man. Paper pale. Across his forehead a jagged scar. Yaobang. Beside him, the shadows of two security officers.

  “As you see, not dead at all …”

  Flexing her fingers, she studied her nails, gesturing toward the window, toward Yaobang. As if remarking to a girlfriend about a handbag in a shop display.

  “… he will be executed, maybe his organs harvested, if you do not kill the Englishman …”

  A head-on collision of emotions. Both extreme, both opposite. Alive, Yaobang alive. A thump of joy in the Senior Investigator’s chest. And in the other corner, regret, loss … already starting a process of grieving for him. The Big Man’s life in the palms of his hands, yet about to leak between his fingers.

  “No, I will not kill for you.”

  Lingling moved around the foot of the casket.

  “Sun, you are making me do things that I do not wish to do. Turning me into someone that I do not want to be …”

  It was raining outside. On the window, the snare-drum rhythm of its fall. The security officers still standing over Yaobang. His hair wet. Its square cut fringe, spiked, as serrated as a bread knife.

  “… that is what men do to women. You turn us into other things. The bits that you do not want, we become. The things that you will not do, we do for you …”

  Heavier, now the rain. On the trees. The leaves. On the grass. Over her shoulder, Piao watching its streaked, grey fall.

  Wash everything away, please wash it all away.

  She was reached into her pocket, in her fingers a piece of paper. Unfolding it slowly. A computer print-out. Its words unveiling a more personal horror. A premature shiver taking hold of Piao.

  “… this is from your specialist at the People’s Military Hospital. The results of your latest blood tests …”

  Taking it from her fingers. Everything with an edge. Hues. Smells. Textures. Feeling the thickness of the paper between his fingers. The print raised infinitesimally above its surface. But not reading it. Not needing to. Knowing that she would tell him. With certainty … knowing.

  “… the transplant organ, the kidney that you were the recipient of at the hands of Charles Haven. It had come from a living donor. A prisoner who was infected. The Englishman would have known of this …”

  Outside, still the rain.
Seeing its flow in rivulets from Yaobang’s nose and chin. Seeing its fall on every individual blade of grass. And above, the sky moving in a seamless shutter … the colour of amalgam spat into a sink.

  “… the prisoner had HIV. You have HIV …”

  She smiled. A lipsticked gash. The sky falling. Piao feeling for a chair as his legs melted. A blurred snap of a glance, out of the window to the gardens. It was still raining, but the Big Man was out of its fall now and nowhere to be seen. Out of its fall, safe and dry. Safe.

  Chapter 38

  See … the waters of the Ghost Month fall on the dry earth. See … we burn the incense. We make the offerings. We appease, pacify the spirits of the ancestors. See … still the rice does not grow.

  The rain … here she came again. Every day. As if earth were turning to ocean. For weeks now. Months?

  Piao sat on a log, its fall in a constant wash down his face. Each drop, a snare beat, drumming the strength back into him, where before there had been none. In the corners of his mouth, its taste … bitter tastes. Only bitter tastes.

  He followed her journey from the main body of the house, a glide in black, leaving no witness to her passage on the sodden lawn. A large, dark umbrella above her head, like a brooding cloud. And then she was with him, standing over him.

  “It is time,” was all that Lingling had said.

  *

  During the ride to the airport he had read the slim file. Arrangements. A hotel room. A car. The airline tickets. Expecting a flight to the United States of America. Gleaming people in gleaming cities. A jolt of surprise pinning his back firmly to the velour upholstery of the black foreign car.

  A flight, one way … to Capital Airport, Beijing.

  *

  On the flight, as they had spanned the garden city of Suzhou, the silk city of Wuxi, Zehngjiang on the Long River Delta, following the straight cut of the Great Canal and crossing the ancient Marshlands of Hebei … he had removed the last two items from the file. A large and detailed article from the provincial newspaper ‘The Daily Weekend’ and a computer listing of Visa details and internal travel permits. The subject … Haven.

  As Piao had drunk tea, scalding and bitter, and the CAAC flight had turned across the frayed edge of the Sea of Bohai … his finger ran down the pale grey lines. The Englishman re-entering the People’s Republic just over a month ago. Forward travel onto Kunming approved and stamped, basing himself there ever since. Kunming, with its reputation as a transit centre for drug trafficking and its major hospital, the Kunming Court, renowned as a centre of excellence. Just days ago, the internal travel permits showing that Haven had entered Beijing. A return flight, CX 251, to the United States of America, reserved … and just days away. So smooth his movement in and out of the People’s Republic. So smooth his internal travel within the country, from province to province without question. It was obvious that he was still a ‘favoured foreigner’. Still a man who had friends in very high places.

  The article from The Daily Weekend was a copy, from a copy, of a copy … grey on grey and barely readable. It debated the new liberalising changes to the law that the National People’s Congress had approved and which had come into effect in January. Among other provisions, it allowed the authorities to seek out alternatives to the use of the firing squad as a means of carrying out state sanctioned executions. It named a doctor, Wang Jun, a director of a hospital in the south-west of the People’s Republic, who, since a few months ago, had been experimenting with the most reliable method of putting people to death. The work had been thorough. Exhaustive. His teams of doctors trying out a never-ending wave of drug cocktails on convicts. Slowly, slowly … narrowing an efficient death down. The main concerns, the main criteria being that the lethal injections should not damage the victim’s internal organs that could be used for transplantation. The final batch of criminals had thanked the director and his team, as they had voluntarily presented their arms … sleeves rolled-up, ready. All had seemed calm. Not one had been tied to their stretchers. Twenty-two had been injected by the doctors. Twenty-two had died. Each death individually monitored by colleagues holding stopwatches and clipboards. Levels of pain accompanying death, duly notated and described. The timings of how long it had taken to die, fastidiously recorded. Death had ranged from three minutes forty-five seconds to just fifty-seven seconds. This was seen as being dependant on whether the criminal was lying down or sitting up. But more so, on what cocktail of drugs had been administered. Mixture No.1 or Mixture No.2. Within days of the final trials, Hu Jiankang, Director of the Intermediate Court, had approved the use of Mixture No.2 as the ‘preferred dose’ of the State, for what he had termed as, ‘a kind of euthanasia’.

  Director Wang Jun’s pioneering work in this field was much praised and was now being studied at national levels to see if it should replace the ritual of execution by a shot to the base of the head or into the back.

  Piao had sipped the tea, now cold, tasteless … as the jet had turned, dropped, whining on its initial approach towards Capital Airport, fifteen thousand feet below. Through the window, heavy cloud. Black on grey. Grey on black. Nothing of the world to be seen. And knowing, before he had even read it, what the footnote in Lingling’s handwriting would say …

  ‘Doctor Wang Jun is the Director of the Kunming Court Hospital.’

  Kunming.

  Haven.

  Friends in high places.

  Chapter 39

  WASHINGTON DC, THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

  The interpreter was working on the last page of the computer data. A fall of Chinese characters toppling down its length, spilling from page to page. Her finger, steady, manicured and baby-pink tipped, scanning across the black laser print, cross referencing.

  “Have you traced the email?”

  Moving slowly across the cutglass vista, Carmichael glanced back toward Barbara Hayes. Removing his spectacles. Polishing their lenses on his tie. His eyes so small, so impossibly small. He resembling a Gucci garbed Winnie the Pooh.

  “Hot mail addresses, false data, and re-routed through at least four systems. It could have come from anywhere …”

  He smiled. His eyes only coming alive once he had replaced his glasses.

  “… I’ve narrowed it down to the People’s Republic.”

  Barbara stared out of her office window across the ‘City of Magnificent Distances’, to the Potomac. It could have been any river at the onset of night. The Thames. The Seine. But more so the Huangpu; perhaps it was, in so many ways. She raised the glass to her lips and drank the wine. Australian … flowers and honey, but strangely soulless, empty. Looking out of the window to the streams of cars, tail-lights slashing … fleeing home to the white and affluent north-west quadrant of the city. Weatherboard twee and stucco chic; worrying about their kid’s college fees and the hardcore porn found under little Billy’s bed. And in the south-west and south-east districts, blacks dreaming about getting a job. Where the fuck the next ten dollars was going to come from and what the hell had ever happened to the American Dream.

  “Madam Hayes, I have finished.”

  Barbara turned to focus on the interpreter; Chinese-American, with the looks that spanned two different worlds … fusing them together in soft tans, silky blacks and features crafted by a much more delicate palette knife.

  “What are they?”

  “Hospital records. Confidential hospital records …”

  The interpreter’s nail scored through a chain of characters, identical on several papers.

  “… this is headed the Shanghai No 1 Hospital, the Huangdong.”

  Barbara dipped her fingertip into the wine and onto her lip.

  “What sort of hospital records?”

  “Lists of transplant organ donors. Lists of the organ recipients.”

  Ask her. Ask her.

  Barbara looked toward the far window. Toward the voice. Bobby, naked and wet. His finger drawing darkly on the sea of condensation. Circles. One, two, three, four … interli
nked.

  Ask her.

  His voice, so clear, but his lips unmoving. Beyond him, beyond the glass of the window, a vista in grids of multicoloured electric. Everyday, Christmas. His face drinking it in … sightlessly.

  Dreaming … just dreaming?

  Barbara pointed to the characters outlined in marker. Fluorescent pink, as bright as cheap candy. Already knowing the answer that would come.

  “And these?”

  “Names, Madam Hayes, as close as they can be to the original American names. This one will be the name of Professor Heywood. This one, the name of Robert Hayes.”

  “Bobby.”

  The interpreter nodded.

  Ask her.

  Barbara drank some more wine.

  “What do the records say about Bobby Hayes?”

  The interpreter’s fingernail moved from character to character.

  “He was a donor. Heart, living kidneys, corneas …”

  She turned the pages, cross referencing; highlighted candy-pink to highlighted candy-pink marker pen.

  “… his kidneys were transferred to the No 7 People’s Hospital in Zhengzhou for immediate transplantation. The corneas were kept at the Shanghai No 1 Hospital and were both used for corneal grafting on the same recipient two days later. There is no further mention of his heart.”

  Ask her.

  “The recipients, do we know who they were?”

  Pages being turned.

  “His kidneys were transplanted into two recipients. They must have been very important officials. Their names have been withheld.”

  “And the corneas?”

  A veil of ebony hair across her face, the interpreter brushing it aside. Her eyes, rubber balls, dancing down the characters and pages.

  “They went to an American national …”

  Tying in the patient’s reference number to a computer billing invoice. Tapping it with her knuckles, as smooth as cowry shells.

  “… the bill, it was paid in cash, forty-five thousand dollars. The corneas went to a child, ten years old. Adam Michael Irving. There is an address in Philadelphia. Also a telephone number.”